– News about Quincy Massachusetts from Quincy Quarry News with commentary added

Picketing teachers
A Quincy Quarry News image

Quincy Quarry News personnel while out and about on the mean streets of Quincy Thursday afternoon found an estimated one hundred and fifty to two hundred people picketing Quincy City Hall over how negotiations on reaching a new teachers’ union contract have apparently hit an impasse.

While all other city unions have reached new agreements, a new union contract for teachers has not been reached to replace the old contract which expired last year.

Only reasonable to assume reasons for the impasse include the following. 

The roughly 15% increase in local public school enrollment in recent years has in turn increased classroom sizes and thus teacher workloads are so increased as nowhere near as many new teachers have been hired to offset the considerable increase in students attending Quincy’s public schools.

“Ruh roh …”
A Quincy Quarry News file photo

Further problematic, there are no valid plans in place to add new classroom capacity for regular education students and so be able to moderate the impact of the ongoing increase in student enrollment upon class sizes.

Additionally, Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch, who as mayor is thus also the  Chair of the School Committee, has been pressing teachers to take on roughly an additional day of work a year without seeing any commensurate increase in their salaries for this increase in teachers’ worktime.  

Conversely, other city workers agreed to new contracts which provide set pay increases upon essentially unchanged workloads.

The one anomaly was with the police contract: specifically, officers hired by Quincy in the past dozen years are now receiving full Quinn Bill benefits even though the Commonwealth has stopped funding its half of this pay pop opportunity given the financial crisis inflicted upon all Commonwealth government budgets by the Crash of 2009. 

More picketing school teachers
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive image

Accordingly, more recent Quincy police hires with qualifying bachelor degrees who were not grandfathered with full Quinn Bill benefits thus scored a 5% pay increase.to their base pay this fiscal year in addition to their COLA pay increase per their new contract..

Additionally, other local police officers hired in the last decade with other degrees are now also receiving weighted Quinn Bill enhancements to their respective salaries.

In turn, as for teachers’ asks, they are not outsized, much less unreasonable.

Obviously, local public school teachers are not amenable to working an extra day a year without seeing any compensation paid to them for doing so as insisted upon by Mayor and School Board Chair Thomas P. Koch’s so-called negotiation team.

After all, who can blame them?

They also would like to see a modest something come their way to reflect how their class sizes have increased considerably in recent years and which has in turn increased their workloads.  The teachers’ negotiation team has posed its proposal to this end as well as is open to a counterproposal, not that anything has come their way so far.

And as for a more specific benefit sought by teachers which only makes sense as roughly three quarters of local teachers are female, they are seeking to  enjoy maternity leave benefits comparable to what other City of Quincy employees enjoy via their union contracts or otherwise. 

Even more picketing teachers
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive image

Be sure to also note that what local teachers seek in the way of improved maternity benefits is less than what one would likely enjoy working at other jobs commensurate with their education as well as that the maternity leave benefits sought are less than what is typically provided by other large school districts in Massachusetts.

Even more picketing teaches yet
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive image

In any event, at present experienced Quincy public school teachers are paid salaries comparable to waht is paid to Weymouth’s public school teachers even though Quincy Mayor Thomas P, Koch has long claimed that Quincy’s public schools are comparable to Newton’s public schools in spite of the fact that Quincy public school students’ MCAS scores only run in around but the woeful 35th percentile and are thus much lower than the scores of Newton public school students.

Then again, it is only reasonable to expect that an at best C student at North Quincy High who went on to drop out of then-Quincy Junior College probably does not truly understand percentiles, much less the bases which buttress the widely accepted effectiveness of Standards-based testing such as the MCAS tests are the better way to discern what students have learned what was taught to them as well as also is  the more valid basis for making for comparisons with other students as compared to normative-based tests.

So what also for the fact that last week Governor Maura Healey announced that Quincy would see a $10 million increase in Chapter 70 state funding for kindergarten=ten to twelfth grade schooling via her recently proposed Fiscal Year 2024 budget.

After all, a ten large pop in state aid to Quincy’s public schools should be more than enough to cover teachers’ specific asks during this new contract cycle as well as likely also a fair chunk of change left over to take care of other pressing local public education needs.

The thing is, what with conversely koched-up annual spending for all other departments having long run at close to three times the rate of inflation as compared to the conversely parsimonious, if not also starvation level of annual funding increases provided to local public schools running at best at perhaps the annual rate o inflation, Quincy Quarry News already as well as fully expects that Mayor Koch plans to endeavor to tacitly shift much of the ten large to other areas of spending than public school educations by trimming his allocation of local tax revenue from what one would expect to be allocated to local schools so that he can so endeavor to pay for things not tied to education via his usual but oh so transparent as well as tawdry engagings in koch and mirrors.

At the same time, surely Mayor had to hear all of the many car horn honkings of support for teachers by passing drivers yesterday

That and how he will surely continue to hear such honkings every Thursday going forward until a new teachers’ union agreement is reached.

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